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Witness accounts give new details in the Blackwater shooting in Nisour Square.

It costs the U.S. government a lot more to hire contract employees as security guards in Iraq than to use American troops.

Robert Young Pelton is the author of "Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror " and the "Guide to the World's Most Dangerous Places." He is also co-founder of http://www.iraqslogger.com/ . This blog item is about his experiences attending the Congressional hearing into the Blackwater shootings in Iraq written on October 2nd, 2007.

The State Department said Thursday that Blackwater USA security personnel had been involved in 56 shootings while guarding American diplomats in Iraq so far this year.

You've heard of golf junkets
for politicians and pay-offs for disc jockeys who help get
artists into the Top 40.
But government bureaucrats invited to play Grateful Dead-style music
and rock music covers from the Clash with military contractors looking

The State Department has interceded in a congressional investigation of Blackwater USA, the private security firm accused of killing Iraqi civilians last week.

A US major is arrested in relation to a bribery scheme involving companies seeking military contracts.

Following a vote in the United States Senate last week to block changes to a bill which would have allowed oil exploration and development of a fragile wildlife habitat in the Arctic, activists are now planning their next steps to ensure that the area remains protected from future environmental threats.

Students at Madison protest against Halliburton Co. recruiters, evoking memories of a 1967 protest of Dow, which made napalm for the US military.

The U.S. government is investigating whether private military contractor Blackwater USA, blamed for the deaths of 11 Iraqis in Baghdad on Sunday, has been shipping unlicensed automatic weapons and military goods to Iraq.

Iraqi commandos are being training by USIS, a Virginia-based company that was once owned by the Carlyle Group. One of multiple "security" forces being created with $20 billion in U.S. funds, these Emergency Response Units may be stoking civil unrest as they accompany U.S. troops on raids.

Oil companies face a dilemma in Iraq over whether to wait for a new oil law which will give them a legal framework in which to operate or to sign agreements now with the Kurdistan Regional Government at the risk of sullying relations with Baghdad and the rest of the country.

A preliminary Iraqi report says that Blackwater security guards needlessly fired at a car, killing a couple and their infant.

The parents of Rachel Corrie, the US peace activist who was crushed to death four years ago in the then Israeli-occupied Gaza as she was protesting against the demolition of Palestinian homes, have been refused permission to sue the company which made the bulldozer that killed her.

Blackwater is back in the news again -- TIME Magazine's Adam Zagorin and Brian Bennett have copies of a document that show that the North Carolina private security company's employees shot and killed eight Iraqis in a firefight.